It's that time of year when many of us reflect on what we've been doing and how we've been doing it. That exercise resulted in a quick search for encrypted notes apps on my end. Trello has been my productivity app of choice but the security model meant that sensitive notes had to be stashed away in a password manager or ProtonMail or Keybase. That's not a great workflow. Luckily, I found Standard Notes quite quickly and it immediately stood out. You could say it was love at first sight. I bought a 5 year plan just a few minutes in.

24 hours later I have 80 notes sharing over 20 tags. Trello boards and email drafts have been migrated and deleted (I have a novel outline in Trello that might stay there a while). Secure notes in my password manager have been copied over. Everything has been consolidated and organized. It's perfect.

It gets better though. In my fixation on the security and productivity features I failed to notice the blogging capabilities. I literally had no idea that those features existed as I rushed to set things up and migrate my existing content. It wasn't until that process was complete that I started thinking about what a great platform Standard Notes would make for selectively sharing content. I was shocked to find a fully baked solution already in place. This Standard Notes/Listed model is something that I have wanted for a very long time. I still have active Ghost, Wordpress, and Twitter accounts that I don't see going away but the relative anonymity and control here is liberating.

Imagine how much better off the world would be if the early internet had evolved with a strong focus on the principles that guide this platform instead of the rapid descent into neurotic hyper-sharing and hyper-connectedness on manipulative platforms that overtook everything shortly after the rise of the blogosphere.

Despite being a bit of a minimalist and not being all that indulgent I have tons of reoccurring subscriptions and app fees. We all do. I can keep a pretty decent handle on what's happening financially with services like Mint and I can track most of my memberships and subscriptions through my password manager but that's not quite enough. I have always found that listing reoccurring payments out in a spreadsheet is super helpful. It allows me to quickly scan the entire set, see the full financial ...